Congress' End-run Of Clinton Plan Rekindles Timber Wars

Northwest States' Loggers Victorious In Federal Court Suit

SALEM, Ore. — The commotion at the federal office building here last week was remarkable mostly because such scenes have been rare around the Pacific Northwest's forests of late.

A room full of flannel-shirted loggers had sneaked in to bid for the right to chop down prime timber. Outside, dozens of rain-soaked environmentalists danced and chanted and blockaded the road. Between them, a swarm of pistol-toting police scowled and prepared to haul the protesters off.

"No laws! No logging!" the protesters' soggy signs screamed.

So much for the calm and decorum that President Clinton's presence had brought to the Northwest's long battle over trees.

Two years after a daylong forest conference in which the president promised a new way to resolve environmental conflicts, the timber wars are raging once again, with demands that federal officials be jailed, sit-ins in tree tops and too many lawsuits to count.

The timber truce collapse, the result of a new Congress and an old resistance to compromise, is seen by some as a setback for Clinton in a region important to his re-election hopes. But the president is getting some of the blame himself, for his recent signature on a "salvage logging" bill that opened up swaths of protected forest to buzz saws.

"We had reached a point where there were not going to be many more battles," said Kristen Boyles, an attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Seattle. "But this has drastically changed the balance in the Clinton forest plan. We're back to where we were."

Although neither loggers nor environmentalists have been happy, a relative calm has prevailed in the Northwest's forests over the last two years as the Clinton administration worked to implement the forest plan that grew out of a 1993 summit meeting.

The plan was approved last year by U.S. District Judge William Dwyer, who in 1991 had virtually shut down logging operations in the region's 24 million acres of federal forests after determining that a decade of extensive logging threatened the endangered northern spotted owl and other wildlife.

Under the plan, the officials' goal is to set aside 80 percent of the region's remaining "old growth" trees and place protective corridors around salmon streams. At the same time, they seek to deliver 1.2 billion board-feet of timber to area mills each year, down from a yearly 8 billion board-feet in the 1980s.

But encouraged by the Republican takeover of Congress last year, dissatisfied timber company executives persuaded lawmakers to pass a "salvage logging" bill aimed at increasing the flow of lumber.

The measure was billed as a means to allow the salvage of burned and rotten timber that made forests more susceptible to wildfire and disease. But it also included a paragraph that would lift environmental protections on healthy, centuries-old trees so they could be harvested without court challenges.

Republicans tucked the logging legislation into a congressional budget bill that included funding relief for the victims of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing and the 1994 California earthquake.

Clinton at first vetoed the bill, citing the logging provision as a give-away to industry. But he later signed it after changes were made that he deemed adequate.

Within days, however, federal forest officials were regretting the signature after industry officials went to court and received a ruling from U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan that the one-paragraph provision applied to more timber than originally thought.

Federal officials now believe it could force the cutting of enough timber to build 60,000 average homes; much of timber would have been protected by the original Clinton plan. In some cases, the trees will fall under controversial "clear-cutting" practices that were eliminated under the plan.

When U.S. Forest Service officials balked at approving the increased logging, industry officials asked Hogan to arrest two high-ranking federal officials. The administration is exploring ways to persuade Congress to go back and amend the new legislation.

"We do not believe that this extreme expansion of ancient timber sales was authorized by the (salvage bill)," Clinton said after the judge's ruling. "The decision forces the release of timber that may lead to grave environmental injury to chinook salmon and other wildlife and damage our rivers and streams."

Shut out of the courtroom, environmentalists have gone back to the forests and streets to denounce what they call "logging without laws." They have dug trenches across forest roads and staged sit-ins atop trees. Thirty protesters were arrested trying to disrupt a job site in southern Oregon.

Many of them criticize the president for being outsmarted by Congress.